Molokai, Book Review

Book Review and Comments
“Molokai” by Alan Brennert

When Rachel Kalama, a five year old girl, found a spot on her skin, “Molokai” began describing a saga of a dreadful disease that hit the Hawaiian Islands. Leprosy was a feared disease with a cure unknown. For Rachel and thousands later, Molokai unfolds the sadness and the bitterness in a life of isolation.

On the island of Molokai, on a remote peninsula known as Kalaupapa, Alan Brennert takes us back to ancient Hawaii and a life without promise, a people faced with the inevitable, death. Even more difficult was living.

Kalaupapa, a place not known to the world, juts out from a island in the Hawaiian chain. Its beauty of a tropical land, with breaking waves, blue skies, and trade winds, is kept from the world by towering cliffs. It becomes a forbidden land, a history not fully told, and not understood. Molokai opens the door to Hawaii’s history, the plight of so many, the goodness and sacrifice of dedicated nuns and amongst the stricken people themselves.

Molokai is a literary weaving of human emotions, Shakespearean in many ways, a search for normalcy where there isn’t normalcy, fact with fiction, ancient Hawaiian culture layered with cultures from other regions, and the search for peace in human turmoil.

The Author’s Perspective

Alan Brennert says that when he went to Hawaii twenty four years ago, he fell in love with the islands. He felt he was coming home. He states that nearly everything he wrote was based on fact yet this in a context of a novel. Rachel Kalama is entirely fiction, but others are actual people—Brother Dutton, Mother Marianne, Ambrose Hutchinson, Lawrence Judd, J.D. McVeigh, Doctors Oliver and Swift. Leilani is based on a medical history.

Kalaupapa

Since 1865, when Kamehameha’s “Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy,” about 8,000 people, men, women, and children, had been exiled to the peninsula. In 1969 the law was repealed. Leprosy is now termed Hansen’s disease. In 1874, a Norwegian physican, G. Armauer Hansen discovered the cause of leprosy, a bacillus (rod shaped bacterium). Hansen disease, with treatment, has been arrested and the medical colony on Kalaupapa has been closed.

To any reader who has a fascination with the history of Hawaii and its people, this is a book for you to read.